On Television, Part I: Language Learning

As a kid, I thought television was the greatest invention ever—and it certainly showed in the countless hours I spent glued to the family TV. I used to wake up early every day before elementary school in order to get in an extra half hour of PBS Kids over breakfast. As I got older, I would regularly beg my parents to let me stay up late to watch Disney Channel specials—you know, the ones that start at 9/8 central on a school night. Until at least 6^th grade, I would watch an hour of Full House followed by an hour of Sabrina The Teenage Witch every day after class. And don’t even get me started on how much of my weekend was taken up by cartoons like SpongeBob SquarePants.

Television, however, tends to get a bad reputation from parents and child development specialists alike, who claim that it “rots children’s brains!” Critics point to the fact that watching TV is a passive and sedentary activity, in contrast to reading and outdoor play, which provide more active avenues for kids to learn. Some even cite the ways in which TV shows can reinforce negative stereotypes or set unrealistic standards for beauty and behavior.

My mom never liked most Disney Channel shows because she believed the characters were overdressed in expensive clothes that looked nothing like the jeans and t-shirts most of my peers and I actually wore to school. The image above, found here, depicts the cast of A.N.T. Farm, a show that became popular in my last year or two of watching Disney.

While I largely agree with these critiques—and probably wouldn’t want my own kids one day to watch nearly as many hours of television as I once did—I do believe that there are significant benefits to watching television, even for kids, that are often overlooked. The primary benefit, I think, comes from TV’s ability to aid in language learning.

When my family moved to the U.S. from Israel in 2001, I didn’t speak a word of English. At home, my parents spoke Russian with me, while my brother usually spoke Hebrew. Because I went to a Jewish preschool, I was fortunate to have two girls in my class who also spoke Hebrew. They were the only kids I played with my first year there because of the language barrier between me and my monolingual English-speaking classmates.

Soon, however, came my first summer in the U.S. With the added free time, I spent a lot of my days watching television. The shows I watched on PBS Kids and Disney Jr. were all in English, and over time, I started to pick up the language from hearing it spoken by my favorite TV characters.

By far, my favorite show that summer was Zoboomafoo, a PBS Kids show about a pair of brothers who own a pet lemur. The image (and background on the show) can be found here.

As with most things, my progress started off subtle. The first thing my brother used to do when he’d come home from work was ask me, in Hebrew, how my day had been. He was shocked when, one day, I answered his question in English, instead of in Hebrew as I always had. Over the course of the summer, I started talking to him more and more in English. Soon, I was also mixing English phrases into conversations in Russian with my parents.

When I returned to preschool in September, my English was quite solid and I now played almost exclusively with the English-speaking students in my class. Improvement in my language abilities certainly came from interacting more with other native speakers, but it was television that gave me the initial boost in vocabulary and pronunciation that I needed to be able to have such interactions in the first place.

My anecdotal experience suggests that language learning may be enhanced by watching television, but in reality, it’s difficult to gauge how effective television truly is as an educational tool. For adults seeking to learn a new language, linguists and psychologists admit that television can be useful, so long as certain guidelines are followed. Experts, for example, recommend using subtitles when watching so that new words can easily be translated in the moment.¹ It also helps to watch shows with repetitive plots and themes—as is the case, for example, with Spanish telenovelas or Korean K-dramas—to make context clues easier to understand.¹ Even so, without formal language education, experts generally agree that one has to watch a tremendous amount of television (verging on “near-obsession”) in order to see tangible progress.¹

At the same time, research suggests that television may actually hinder language development in children. One study from Columbia University found that Hispanic toddlers who regularly watched TV for 2 or more hours per day had impaired Spanish language skills compared to their peers who watched TV less frequently.² Similar results have been cited in analogous studies conducted with monolingual English-speaking American children.³ Currently, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) does not recommend television consumption by children under the age of 18 months, and primarily only endorses educational children’s shows, like the kind found on PBS Kids, for children ages 2-4.⁴

Of course, it’s possible that these recommendations are overly cautious. The vast majority of research linking television and language learning is only correlational and does not prove that TV itself necessarily causes impairments to language development. There could be other factors, such as parenting style, that contribute to both screen time and language development. Nonetheless, existing evidence does seem to point to the fact that context, such as age, show content, and family background, matter when it comes to evaluating television’s potential benefits.

One key difference between my experience and most studies looking at the effects of television on language development in children is that I was not learning English as my first language. By the time I began binge-watching PBS Kids, I had already developed communication skills in Russian and Hebrew. This difference may be why I saw so much benefit from increased screen time that summer, while most children learning a language for the first time do not. It helped, too, that I was watching educational content. Though I couldn’t use subtitles as language experts suggest, the fact that the new words I was learning were paired with on-screen images was also likely a big part of what made the TV-mediated learning valuable.

To an extent, I watched so much television out of necessity. TV was the closest thing I had to an English tutor. My parents and brother were still learning English themselves when we moved to the U.S., and by that point, it was already their third language. They couldn’t necessarily model proper grammar or pronunciation for me, and their vocabularies were quite limited. TV was a reliable way to get the additional English exposure I needed.

Who knows—maybe TV really did rot my brain. I’d like to believe, though, that in the right circumstances and with the right carefully curated content, TV can actually expand our brains, supplement our education, and enhance language learning, even in children like four-year-old me.

References:

¹ Cohen, E. (2018, March 19). The television trick to learning a new language. Retrieved July 21, 2019, from https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/19/health/learn-new-language-telenovela-trick/index.html

² Duch, H., Fisher, E., Ensari, I., Font, M., Harrington, A., Taromino, C., . . . Rodriguez, C. (2013). Association of Screen Time Use and Language Development in Hispanic Toddlers: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Study. Clinical Pediatrics, 52(9), 857-865.

³ Zimmerman, F., & Christakis, D. (2005). Children’s Television Viewing and Cognitive Outcomes: A Longitudinal Analysis of National Data. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 159(7), 619-625.

⁴ American Academy of Pediatrics Announces New Recommendations for Children’s Media Use. (2016, October 21). Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages/American-Academy-of-Pediatrics-Announces-New-Recommendations-for-Childrens-Media-Use.aspx